A Note from Neale...

Hello my wonderful friends...

I said in previous weeks here that we were going to break down the average person's life into five distinct areas, then use these installments here in the Weekly Bulletin to explore each of them as they relate to the Holy Experience.

Loosely, most people's lives might be broken down into these areas or situations:

Yourself

Your significant other

Your family

Your work or chief activity

Your larger life in the world

We have already looked at the Holy Experience and yourself. In the most recent issues of the Bulletin we looked at the Holy Experience and your significant other. Now let's look at the Holy Experience and your family.

"Family" is the closest we will ever come to creating, embracing, expressing, and experiencing the true nature of our ultimate reality. The feeling that most people have inside of the family environment is the feeling that the soul has when it returns to God.

It is a feeling of oneness, of what might best be described as "singularity in multiplicity." Within a family we feel as if we are experiencing a "singularity," and within this singularity family members experience themselves as a "multiplicity." We are multiple members of a single unit. We have individuated experiences of a single, combined experience.

When we are with family, we feel we are "home." This is true wherever those family members and we may be at the time.

This is precisely the experience that the Individuated Essence that we call the Soul moves through when encountering The Single Essence that some of us call God.

When the experience of "family" is a good one, it is the experience of being loved without condition, protected in every situation, encouraged and supported in each endeavor, and never really feeling alone.

This is precisely the experience we have when we observe that we are part of the eternal and endless Family of God. What life invites us to experience is an even grander version of that. We are invited by life to, first, notice the wonder of the experience called family, and then, to extend it. To extend that joy and love and safety and wonder to all those whose lives we touch.

We are invited to experience ourselves as members of the human family, and to imagine how we would treat others if we really thought that we were exactly that: members of the same family. This is the Holy Experience as it relates to our family.